Happy Star Wars Day: Yoda Descriptive Writing and Yoda Swamp Slime!

May the Fourth Be With You my Friends! I love the first week of May. There are so many fun and interesting little bits and bobs about this week.

May Day, Cinco de Mayo, and of course Star Wars Day!

I'm going to have a ton of fun with my students on May the Fourth, and I wanted to share with you a few fun things I found to make it a Galactic Day! Of course.. one cannot begin teaching on May Fourth without:
a) playing Star Wars music... all... day...long
b) speaking like Yoda... all...day....long..<LoL> Let's all admit THAT gets annoying after 20 minutes.

At any rate, I do have standards to focus on, so for reading we are going to finish up our Space Unit, so we are going to read about jobs that are part of the space program. I assign my students articles from NEWSELA to read and annotate. Have you used NEWSELA before? This sight is amazing! I love that my students get the practice of reading and annotating on the computer. Plus we can adjust the lexile level of the material, so it is a perfect way to differentiate within the classroom while still discussing a similar piece of informational text. I'm still waiting for NEWSELA to come out with some specific Star Wars articles, so we'll have to read about space and pretend we are heading to a galaxy far...far...away.

To incorporate a little more language work with similes and metaphors, I am going to show my students the scenes where Luke first meets Yoda in the Empire Strikes Back. I'm using these because it will relate to our STEM activity (Keep reading below). We are going to brainstorm some adjectives, verbs and adverbs to describe the swamp, and I'm going to throw in some preposition work too. We are going to incorporate these into a similes activity to describe Yoda and his home. I found this picture of Yoda on a free printables page. I trimmed off the head and shoulders for a page topper, and then we cut the rest of the body up the middle so we could write on the inside and show Yoda's body.

I'm asking my students to write 3 similes and 3 metaphors that would incorporate a character trait of Yoda. I'm pushing them to enhance their work by trying to show the type of character Yoda was through his thoughts, words and actions.

Next Up: STEM TIME!

I feel like the best part of the day will be our STEM time, because we will be making Yoda Swamp Slime! I mean, the day can't get any better than that when we make Yoda Swamp Slime! This is your basic slime craze slime with green food coloring. For slime you need 1oz of glue, (which is perfect since we are talking about measurement conversions right now in math)which is about a quarter of a glue bottle by the way, 1/4 cup of water, food coloring (optional) and 1/4 cup of borax. You mix the glue and water together, add the food coloring, and then slowly add the borax until you get a good consistency. The kids will need to use their hands, which of course is always a squishy gross feeling, but they will love making and taking HOME the Yoda Swamp Slime!

You can check out my Instagram and Facebook pages where I'll be posting some pictures of our Intergalactic day!

Do you have any fun celebration days coming up? I would love to hear any other ideas or activities that you plan around Star Wars Day.. or any upcoming fun days for May!